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Apr26
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In the news-you-can-use category: There are already at least as many definitions of "branding" as there are of "marketing". Which, as the last Democrat in the White House would tell you, are almost as plentiful as definitions of "is" and "are". I've always been inclined to look at marketing as all the things you do that give people reasons to buy your stuff as opposed to anyone else's. But here's another perspective. Marketing is the profitable movement of your product (or your service) from concept...to purchase. This implies that the "marketing" function has touched the conception and implementation of the product's design, which implies that customers/consumers have factored heavily into conceiving in the first place; that it's priced to afford you a good margin and give the customer perception of a good deal, placed or distributed in such a way that those people have access to it, and promoted in ways that resonate with them. Any friction along the way, from manufacturability and quality issues to distribution/availability, to a lousy value proposition, in other words, anything that hinders movement of your product from conception to consumption, is a barrier that good marketing should guard against, minimize, or prevent altogether. A lot the old texbooks mentioned those old "4 P's". But you can also think about it as movement, as in moving products and inventory.
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Apr24
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Alan Saracevic, biz writer/columnist for SF Chron, gave props to Sun (SUNW) founder (and soon-to-be-Sun-ex-CEO) Scott McNealy yesterday in anticipation of the official announcement today (McNealy Out As Sun CEO) of the end of the McNealy era at the company he...
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Apr21
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Hey, even do-no-evil brainiacs experience occasional brain flatulence: As Silicon Valley.com reports today: "How surreal was Google's home page logo Thursday? So much so that the company removed it midday -- at the request of Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miró's family." ...
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Apr20
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The gay mayor of Gay Paree (not that there's anything wrong with that), Bertrand Delanoe, says in an op-ed piece in today's SFChron, Paris in the 21st century , that his city is eager to get down to business. Which may...
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Apr19
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George Parker at Adhurl hit it on the pointy little head of The New York Times (NYT) ad column which breathlessly reported the "new trend" of marketers sponsoring TV programs. New? NEW?! Where and how does Timesman Stuart Elliot believe the...
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Apr18
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Gotta take issue with my KMM colleague George Parker over at Adhurl, whose hilarious asides there, and at Adscam never fail to crack me up, but I happen to think Seth Godin is worh reading. Godin's mini-tomes might appear to be...
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Apr14
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No argument that Disaster Set Off The Boom, but the city of Oakland, and surrounding East Bay, simply could not unseat the "brand" which had already been established by the city of San Francisco. The centennial commemoration of the 1906 earthquake and fire that devastated...
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Apr12
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Jeeze, what’s the prez of Prestige U. to do when his brand’s being bashed harder than the Bush White House in San Francisco ? Maybe just take PR counsel from Harry Truman. More on that in moment. First, the news:...
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Apr11
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At latest count, less than five percent of the Fortune 500 publish blogs open to the public. And they're the tech companies. I still don't know if this is good or bad, or how it's progressed. Steve Rubell probably knows. ...
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Apr10
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Let's see. We're 90 days and change into a year the biz pundits said would be rife with takeovers. For marketers and the brands they wield, mergers and acquisitions have always presented varying degrees of migraines. If you're the engulfer,...
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Apr 6
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Lee Gomes used to write for the San Jose Mercury before the demise of daily newspapers. Now he writes for The Wall Street Journal during the demise. Nonetheless, he continues to write as well as ever and his "Portal" column...
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Apr 5
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Dean Wormer's game was education (Faber College, remember?), not real estate. But what might brand managers learn from behavioral psychologists in today's anxiety-ridden housing market? My old friend Peter Coy of Business Week, who wrote this week's cover story ("Buyer and Seller Beware",...
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Apr 4
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The bottom line of corporate marketing -- the function most often associated with the care and feeding of brands -- is to have the same gravitas as the product and sales functions. In theory, there should be no problem here...
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Apr 3
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In the interest of equal time, here's the companion list to the Biggest Lies Clients Tell Agencies: 1. We’re not like other agencies. Yeah, your "different". Except for your business model, the way you swap-out employees with other shops, the...
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